Virtue tones down the excesses of the Voidz’s debut to deliver an album that is ultimately more accessible but less compelling.
So far, 2018 has been quite the year for indie rockers we remember fondly from the early to mid-2000s. In the past two months, Franz Ferdinand released a relatively straightforward fifth album and Jack White got a little too weird on his third solo album. Now, Julian Casablancas gives us his second album with the Voidz, Virtue.
“Wait a minute? The Voidz? I don’t remember listening to them while making my MySpace!”
If you haven’t heard of the Voidz, you’re in good company. For most of us, Julian Casablancas will forever be tied to the Strokes, where he served as the charismatic frontman. Unfortunately, the Strokes are forever tied to their legendary early releases, which has ensured that every review written since 2010 contains the remark “it’s doesn’t reach the highs of Is This It.” Thus, it’s no wonder that all five members of the Strokes have been involved in some sort of side or solo project in an attempt to escape these comparisons. Casablancas released the solo album Phrazes for the Young back in 2009, but it seemed a modest debut for such a lauded figure.
Enter the Voidz, a band no one would dare call unambitious. Initially called Julian Casablancas + the Voidz, the band announced their presence in 2014 with the 11-minute single “Human Sadness.” Their debut album that followed, Tyranny, was full of strange sound effects, random stops and starts, and copious vocal distortion. They look like a gang from 70s cult film The Warriors. Just as Casablancas’s time with the Strokes began to represent nostalgia, his work with the Voidz represented potential.
Virtue tones down the excesses of the Voidz’s debut to deliver an album that is ultimately more accessible but less compelling. You no longer have to wait five minutes to reach a track’s climax, and the band takes less of a “kitchen sink” approach to their gimmicks this time around. In other words, you’re less likely to hear everything from siren noises to radio show samples within a two-minute stretch on Virtue. While it still bristles with the edge and eccentricities that set the Voidz apart from their peers, its calculated efforts do make it feel a little too familiar at times.
As the Voidz primarily exist to highlight Julian Casablancas’s more experimental side, it should come as no surprise that Virtue excels when it comes out of left field. For instance, the single “QYURRYUS” is best described as someone’s bad dubsteb impression meets heavily-distorted Middle Eastern guitar scales. “Pyramid of Bones” frequently delves into chaos, complete with brief thrashing freakouts, but finds stability in a Black Sabbath-like metal riff. Perhaps the biggest shock of all though, is how the album’s milder moments really stand out. “Pink Ocean” is the grooviest the band have ever sounded, with Casablancas’s soft falsetto only interrupted by a cheesy synthesizer solo and an intricate guitar outro. Similarly, “ALieNNatioN” has a thumping bass beat and drums that give it an R&B feel, while its piano part pushes it into Miike Snow turf. The Voidz aren’t your average rock band, and reach their peak when transgressing any particular categorizations.
It’s tempting to constantly compare the Voidz to the Strokes thanks to the Casablancas connection, but one should remember this is a completely separate band that likely dropped the “Julian Casablancas” from their name to disassociate themselves from his more popular project. That said, there are some parts of Virtue where you really can’t help but compare them to the Strokes The album’s first single and opening track “Leave It In My Dreams” sounds exactly like something from a latter-day Strokes release. Ditto for “Permanent High School.” At other times, the Voidz don’t necessarily sound like the Strokes, but do embrace a very conventional style of rock that masks the band’s distinguishing characteristics. “One of the Ones” revolves around repetitive garage rock guitars, and “Lazy Boy” has touches of 80s synthesizer but is otherwise the most cut-and-dry track on Virtue. The Voidz may have shaken off their label as a one-time backing band for Casablancas that came with Tyranny, but occasionally shortchange themselves by totally eschewing experimentation.
Back before the release of Tyranny in 2014, Casablancas called the release a “protest record” and seemed to imply that the Voidz would be his more political project, full of tracks with lyrics sticking it to the man. Now, I can’t help but think “Tyranny had lyrics?” This is again the case on Virtue, where Casablancas’s voice is too autotuned, garbled, or otherwise mumbled for the strong majority of his performance to be comprehensible. Occasional punk lines do slip through, like the phrase “murder in the name of national security” that appears on both “Pyramid of Bones” and “ALieNNatioN.” These can get a little too blunt at times, like opening “We’re Where We Were” with the lines “new holocaust happening, what are you blind?/We’re in Germany now, 1939,” but this song is at least redeemed by its intensity and frantic drumming. Less can be said for “Think Before You Drink,” which marks the both the mid-section of the album and its nadir. If lyrics that are essentially “don’t drink the Kool-Aid” weren’t unappealing enough, realize the track highlights Casablancas wailing over an acoustic guitar part. Writing anti-establishment lyrics is a delicate balancing act, but the Voidz at least deserve credit for going all-in with their sentiments, unlike other recent releases.
There’s a lot to take in during the 15-track hour-long Virtue, and the album as a whole defies any sort of simple description. Listening end to end, there’s no telling what the next track will sound like, and the album embraces, albeit hesitantly, its own weirdness. Sometimes this hesitancy comes in the form of conventionality, while other times the production is lacking, like on the almost-brilliant “Wink” and “Black Hole.” Still, Virtue is at its best when the band lets go of their inhibitions, and there are many bright spots within the album’s controlled chaos. It may not be for everyone, even with its modest step into accessibility, but as Casablancas notes on “Permanent High School,” “just because something’s popular don’t mean it’s good.”
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